ATA Nigeria - M&E

A monitoring and evaluation application that measures the progress of
Nigeria's Agricultural Transformation Agenda.

Dec 2014 to Mar 2015

Purpose-icon

Purpose

The Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) is an initiative of the Nigerian
Government's Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to develop
the role of agriculture in Nigeria's economy.

The application is a functional prototype that demonstrates how the ATA's
progress can be measured in the context of a specially developed monitoring and
evaluation framework.

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People

This has been a very collaborative project for us. We worked directly with
agricultural measurement learning and evaluation experts from the
ALINe initiative, and data visualisation experts
from LiveStories, and adding our own expertise in
building effective, accessible web tools for international development. The
team worked with government officers at Federal and State-level in Nigeria, and
local policy and development experts.

The application will be used to demonstrate to Federal and State-level
officers the potential to understand the impact of ATA interventions, and to
plan new ones using evidence from real data. There are many challenges in
delivering effective tools, especially at State level where infrastructure
support can be at a low level, and government officers might not have had the
opportunity to learn the potential of modern IT solutions. The team visited
offices in the Nigerian states of Kogi and Benue (which were the focus of this
study) and worked directly with the potential users to determine the best
design for the application.

During the software development phase the LiveStories came and worked with us
in our offices in Cambridge. LiveStories are based in Seattle, so this was a
great opportunity for us to work together, in the same space, and in the same
time-zone.

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Process

ALINe worked on a theory of change for the ATA and a M&E framework based on the
key crops in the agricultural sector. For the proof-of-concept application the team
focussed on two of the 16 key crops: Cassava and Rice, and on two Nigerian
states: Benue and Kogi. The team visited Federal government offices and offices
in Benue and Kogi to understand their requirements. What kind of data were
they already working with? What environmental challenges are there for IT
solutions? What would they want to get out of a measurement tool for the ATA?
The LiveStories team lead this part of the project and it was a great chance
for us to experience their processes and to work with their highly skilled
technical and design experts. They developed personas and stories that
fed into the design of the application.
We built the prototype application in two phases with a visit to Nigeria
between to check in with real users.

code-icon

Code

The design focusses on simplicity and was designed for mobile devices first and
then adjusted so it still looked great and worked well on larger screens.

The application is really simple: a simple page showing charts of data from
before and after the start of ATA interventions. The front-end is a Django
application with one page that handles changes to the selected filters passing
them on to the embedded charts. It uses LiveStories as a back-end to store the
data and to prepare the charts. The bulk of our technical work was in
extracting and preparing the data for those charts.